Embracing-the-shortness - Embracing The Shortness Since '96

JOMP Book Photo Challenge

December 09, 2023 - Favourite Page Design

Even blood washes out, or you can fill your mouth with things that hide the taste.

Sophie Mackintosh, excerpt from Cursed Bread

Trick or treat!

I give you, a very respectable, distinguished homeowner 🐾

Анна Ин в гробниците на света || Олга Токарчук ★★★★★ Started: 27.04.2025 Finished: 01.05.2025 "Анна Ин в гробниците на света" е единствената книга от поредицата "Myths" на издателство "Cannongate", която не е преведена на английски, но за огромен мой късмет съществува това прекрасно издание на български. За пореден път се уверявам, че кураторът на поредицата Джейми Бинг е имал изключителен усет към адаптациите на митове - на фона на множеството посредствени преразкази на дневни митове, всяка една книга, избрана от него, е изключителна - и творбата на Олга Токарчук не е изключение. Тя не е просто преразказ на мита за слизането на Инана в Подземния свят: в думите на преводача Крум Крумов, "Олга Токарчук разглобява древния мит за богинята Инана, след което го нанизва наново върху конците на съвремието." - самата аз не бих могла да опиша творбата по по-добър начин.

Hungerstone || Kat Dunn ★★☆☆☆ Started: 24.02.2025 Finished: 14.03.2025 Thank you to NetGalley and Zando for providing me with an ARC and giving me the opportunity to share my honest review. "Hungerstone" is, ostensibly, a very well-researched and painstakingly crafted novel, that unfortunately amounts to very little. Yes, the clothing and the cuisine described are era-appropriate, but they only make the novel tedious, at times even dull. By contrast, the characters seem to have been afforded less thought - the husband is a painfully one-dimensional caricature of a robber baron, the Carmilla of Dunn is nowhere near as eloquent as Le Fanu's, oftentimes she is simply rude to the point you can't understand how anyone could find her alluring, and the protagonist, Lenore, flounders through the pages, puppeteered, at different times, by her husband and then by Carmilla. She psychoanalyzes herself like a modern woman, unequivocally finding the roots of her problems in her traumatic childhood, and yet does nothing with that insight until Carmilla prods her into action. There is a lot of telling instead of showing, a lot of unambiguous hammering of the author's ideas that makes for a mostly unpleasant reading experience - the reader is not allowed to draw their own conclusions at any point, everything is conveniently spelled out on the page. In short, "Hungerstone", much like "Our Hideous Progeny", is a lukewarm (at best) retelling of a much more competent, enticing, exciting novel, interspersed with poorly planted 21st century feminism, that ends up being a mind-numbingly tedious experience. I can recognize the effort that went into this work, but just because something takes a lot of time and research, doesn't mean it's good.

“She can’t take the same path back . All her life she’s avoided that, always making a circle, afraid to return for what she might find waiting along the way. The sense always of being followed.”

From Bright Air Black by David Vann

Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek Myth || Natalie Haynes ★★☆☆☆ Started: 03.03.2025 Finished: 09.03.2025 Curiositas vincit omnia After being left thoroughly underwhelmed by Haynes's previous book, "Stone Blind", I wasn't all too willing to pick up "Divine Might". Unfortunately, my curiosity won, and I cracked it open, and had it not been for the flicker of hope this book gave me at the end of the first chapter with the paragraph about Sappho, I would not have finished it - I was hoping for similar insights about the other characters discussed in the book, and I got none. The narrative is very disjointed - Haynes has inundated her chapters with jokes that more often miss than hit, and with semi-fitting but ultimately uninteresting and dragging references to movies that are at best tangentially connected to the goddesses she writes about. There is a marked downgrade from "Pandora's Jar" - the discussion is nowhere near in depth or engaging. It's unfortunate to see an author's writing get worse and worse with every published book - I'm afraid this is the case with Natalie Haynes. It's hard to believe she was intrinsically motivated or inspired to write this book at all. In the chapter about Hestia (one of the weakest in the book, that tells very little, if anything, about the goddess), she admits to the following: "There comes a time in every author's life when she has to accept that she may not have made the absolute best possible decision. And the day when I blithely promised 10,000 words on a goddess who is barely mentioned in any ancient source, who makes no dent on the Renaissance? That may turn out to have been just such a time." Then why choose this particular goddess? Greek Mythology isn't lacking in goddesses, so why allocate that much literary real estate to a goddess you don't have much at all to say about? "Divine Might", while nowhere near as egregiously bad as "Stone Blind", was a frustrating read nonetheless - there are interesting points in there, but they are far too few and far in between to make this novel worth your time.

More sketches from The Will of the Many! I loveeeee these two and I want to see more of them ofc.